Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 1.djvu/240

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

[9 th S. I. MAR. 19, '98.

Easter proceeds from ME. ANSCOMBE'S assump- tion that the use of the Dionysian Easter tables implies, and is identical with, the use of the Dionysian era for the dating of legal and historical documents. This assumption might have been saved by noting the careful way in which the great writers on chronology refrain from drawing such an apparently obvious conclusion. That it is fallacious may be proved by a single instance. ME. ANSCOMBE assumes that because the Roman Church used the Dionysian Easter tables in the time of St. Gregory,* therefore that Pope must have used the Dionysian era for dating purposes. Now as a matter of fact we know that the Papal chancery did not begin to use this era until the tenth century, and that Gregory himself dated his letters, &c., by the imperial and consular years and by indictions.t Moreover, the sixth-century Christian monuments at Rome are dated in the same manner. J They yield no instance of the use of the Dionysian era. Here it is necessary to refer to another fallacy of ME. ANSCOMBE'S that the dating by indictions implies amongst Christians the use of the era of the Incarnation, since the "masters of computistic " take a year of the Incarnation as the basis of a calculation to find the indic- tion of that year. He has omitted to point out that they also give a rule to find the year of the Incarnation by means of the indiction. Dionysius himself dates the first year of his cycle in the Roman legal manner that is, by the indiction and by the consular year|| and Beda in his earlier works similarly used the Roman system.lT

the later use of the English Church, as is pointed out by Krusch (Neues Archiv, ix. 114). This learned scholar, more careful than MR. ANSCOMBE, holds that by Gregory's time the Dionysian com- putation of Easter had become the predominant one at Rome.
 * This, by the way, is only an assumption from

f Paul Ewald, ' Studien zur Ausgabe des Registers Gregors I.' in the Neues Archiv, iii. 549. Similarly, a gift of his in 587 is thus dated (Marini, ' I Papiri Diplomatic!,' No. 89).

J De Rossi, ' Inscriptiones Urbis Romae Chris- tianas, ' i. iv. Especially noteworthy is the inscrip- tion of 565 (i. 501) of " Gerontms, primicerius notariorum sanctae e[c]clesiae Romanae," dated by indiction and consular year. It was to a pre- decessor of this chancery officer that Dionysius addressed one of his Paschal letters. The era of the Incarnation does not occur in the sixth and seventh century Italian deeds in Marini.

These " masters " merely repeat one of the Egyptian " argumenta " or calculi given by Dionysius.

bergae, 1715), p. 74.
 * Janus, ' Historia Cycli Dionysiani ' ( Vitem-

If His 'De Temporibus,' written in 703, is dated by the imperial year and indiction (cc. 14, 22).

The following are the only examples hitherto cited of the apparent use of the era of the Incarnation prior to the time of Beda. First we have two sixth-century instances given by Jan,* the learned historian of this era, wnich Ideler t rightly describes as "ambiguous." They consist (a) of a cal- culation of the age of the world in the chronicle of Victor Tunensis from the Crea- tion to the Nativity of Christ, and from then to 567, and (b) of a note in the life of St. Euthymius by Cyrillus that the saint died 5965 years after the Creation and 469 years after the Nativity. Neither of these passages proves the use of this reckoning as an era,! for Victor calculates his dates by the consular or imperial years, and Cyrillus records his hero's birth and death in like manner. We have next a quotation (c) from Bishop Julian of Toledo, written in 686, giving the period from the Creation and the Nativity. Here again, as Prof. Riihl remarks, neither reckon- ing is used as an era, since Julian carefully explains the latter date by the Spanish era. The same remark applies to (d) a Madrid MS.|| giving the years from the Incarnation to the year 672. All these four instances are based, directly or indirectly, upon the cal- culation of the age of the world by Eusebius and Jerome, and they all distinctly use other eras for dating purposes. Next comes (e) the 562 computus wrongly cited by ME. ANS- COMBE as a work of Cassiodorus. This is not a " computus Paschalis," as stated by Ideler and Riihl, but is merely a portion of the argumenta of Dionysiusl brought up to date,

Cf. Mommsen, 'Chronica Minora,' p. 226. This dating occurs even in his ' Chronica ' in reference to English events (ed. Mommsen, p. 311), although he occasionally uses the era of the Incarnation. This work was written in 725.

p. 24.
 * ' Historia yErae Christianas,' Vitembergae, 1714,

f ' Handbuch der Chronologic,' ii. 375.

+ This has been already remarked by Jan regarding Victor. Jan also notes that it is not clear whether Cyrillus here uses the era of Dionysius or some other.

Franz Riihl, ' Chronologic des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit,' Berlin, 1897, p. 199.

a seventeenth or eighteenth century transcript (Krusch, in Pertz's Archiv der GeseUxchaft fur dltere deutsche Geschichtskunde, viii. 799). It was not until the twelfth century that the era of the Incarnation came into general use in Spain (Neues Archiv, ix. 121).
 * Krusch in Neues Archiv, ix. 121. This is from

H Krusch, ib., ix. 113. This is preserved in an eighth - century MS. in the British Museum (Caligula A. xv. ), written in England, according to the British Museum 'Catalogue of Latin MSS.' There is nothing to connect it specially with Italy, and Ideler's inference from its ascription to Cassio- dorus that the Dionvsian era was in ecclesiastical